Remembering my vision

   

    Have you ever had a week where you question why you are doing what you are doing? That was me this week. I often caught myself wondering why I was putting in so much hard work for the output it seemed like I was getting.  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love teaching and there really is nothing else I would rather do, but lately I am becoming quite frustrated with the education world. That is why I decided it would be a good idea to remember why I decided to become a teacher and what my goals are as a teacher.

     I've wanted to teach since I was a little girl teaching to my teddy bears.  I've always enjoyed learning and finding fun ways to teach things to other people.  The idea of getting other people to be passionate about a subject was very intriguing to me.  So I went to college and got my undergraduate degree in elementary education. During my first job teaching I fell in love with helping students with disabilities.  That is when I decided to get my masters in special education.  I wanted more knowledge to better help all levels of learners that came into my classroom.

    Now as a second year teacher I spend so much time thinking about how I can each individual student.  I believe that every student has a story behind who they are, that is worth learning about.  There are those students who will test you and make you sometimes feel as though you wish they weren't a part of your class.  Usually when you take the time to get to know them you realize it isn't because they are just a bad kid, it is that they have been living through bad situations.  Maybe those kids won't be the kids that make all A's, but they could be the kids that I teach a life lesson to, which in their world could mean more than great grades.  Then there are those kids who think they know everything and have to have their say in class.  It is easy to want to constantly ignore them and shrug them off because they already know what they need to know.  However, getting to know them better you often see that they are dying for attention because they don't get it anywhere else. There are many other types of students, but my point is that I want to find a way to help every student succeed.  Success doesn't have to be measured by grades either.  I like to measure success on an individual basis.  If my students grow throughout the year in some positive way then I feel that it is been as successful year.

     It is so easy to get frustrated as a teacher because not every child is behaving in the perfect way or making the best grades.  However, when you look behind what you see at school you can understand why they act the way that they do.  If I have any goal at all it is to make every child see that they can be successful no matter what life circumstances stand in their way. Sometimes students just need someone to believe in them.  

   So yes, the excessive amount of paperwork is tedious, sometimes co-workers aren't the most respectful, and situations come up that don't seem fair; but those things aren't part of why I became a teacher.  I am a teacher because I want to be the person my students know believes in them.  I'm a teacher because I want to give children a passion for learning.  I'm a teacher because I love seeing a real smile on my students faces.  Those things are worth every bad day that I've had and will have.  There is no doubt that teaching is hard, but remembering my vision makes it much easier.

Teaching Egypt in Pictures

It is always fun starting a new unit. I especially love to teach Egypt because there are so many fun activities to do with it. There are also plenty of resources to use when teaching Egypt.   I hooked my students into the unit by passing around books about Egypt and having them write down what looked interesting to them.  We then looked at a map that compared the location of Egypt to Mesopotamia.  It was good for them to see how close the two civilizations were to each other.   To look into the geography of Egypt we spent some time thinking about the benefits of the Nile river. We made our own river in our interactive social studies notebooks.  After studying geography we took a closer look at the daily life of ancient Egyptians.  Here is the book we put together:

The next day we looked into what Egyptians wore.  We made our own necklaces with famous symbols as charms.  We talked about Egyptian art and the meaning of the symbols they used.

 

Yesterday we learned about schools in Egypt and their writing system.  One activity I did was a class venn diagram to compare ancient Egyptian schools to our school.  This was very easy for them to do but a good visual.  Next year I think I will have my students make a model or picture of what an ancient school would have looked like. 

They really enjoyed writing in hieroglyphics.  Everyone learned how hard it was to decipher messages since the hieroglyphics represented individual syllables.  If I have more time next year I would love for them to make scrolls to put their hieroglyphic message on.
 

For Halloween we talked about mummification and the Egyptian believe in afterlife.  They were all into this and wanted to know everything about how mummies were made.

I'm only half way through this unit so far.  I'm excited to talk about pyramids and the social class system next.  What activities do you use to teach ancient Egypt?

Calling all Middle School Pinterest lovers!

I'm super thrilled that Pinterest is now adding special boards for education.  They are calling it Teachers on Pinterest and are putting together public boards for educators to collaborate with.  Right now they have a board for all the elementary grades and are about to add middle school boards.  I was contacted to help start a middle school english and social studies board since those are the subjects I teach.  I need other Pinners to pin on these boards before they will make them public.  So if you pin middle grades language arts or social studies pins, please follow me on Pinterest and leave a comment so I can add you to be able to pin on these boards.
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New Units

   I'm so thankful for a fresh new start next week.  Last week I finished up Mesopotamia and my elements of fiction unit.  I'm going to reteach a few concepts on Monday and Tuesday from those two units before moving on.  My standard class didn't do as well on the fiction test as I would have liked so  I'm going to spend some time working in small groups with what they missed on their tests.  I'm also going to summarize what we have learned so far about the ancient world before moving write into Egypt.  I have a great book that has a page with graphics for each important time in history.  I'm going to use that to create a timeline of the world so far.  Wednesday it will be time for Ancient Egypt and Poetry!




For anyone else who teaches ancient civilizations, you are welcome to use the LiveBinder I put together.  It has a tab with links to all kind of Ancient Egypt sites.

Social Studies

How will I begin teaching ancient Egypt?

I have a book of Ancient World Reader's Theatre Plays which I will start off with to grab their attention.  I then plan on showing the connection between Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.  Before we start learning important vocabulary I'm going to pass around Egypt books and have students write down what they find interesting in the books and would want to learn more about.

How will I begin teaching poetry?

Before I even start teaching poetry I will start Monday and Tuesday by reading some fun poems to the class.  We will begin learning types of figurative language on Wednesday.  I plan on using a lot of music to begin with to draw the students into learning about poetry.  I found a couple of parody's I'm going to show and then have them create their own parody.

In other news...I'm hoping to get back to a normal routine next week myself.  I haven't been doing much exercising or anything for myself really in the past month with all I've had going on.  This weekend I haven't been feeling that great so I'm truly hoping that Monday morning will bring a fresh start and a renewed spirit.  I found this awesome song called "Breathing Air Again" that is about taking a breath of fresh air and trusting God to be with you through every step of the day.

Have a blessed week!

Five for Friday

I haven't posted much lately so I thought I'd at least link up today for Five for Friday to share a bit of my week.

{one}

On Monday I played the song from Flocabulary that goes with the Mesopotamia unit. I've done a lot of songs with my lessons lately but my students really enjoyed this one.  This song is great to review everything about Mesopotamia, it includes almost all of the key vocabulary.

{two}

We read a short version of the Epic of Gilgamesh this week. I then had my students create comics to illustrate an adventure Gilgamesh was in.  I was impressed at their creativity making the comics.  It was a great lesson in sequence of events. 

{three}

Last Saturday I went to the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival near the mountains with my parents.  It was a beautiful day for it & I was able to find a couple gifts for people at work.  We also saw some pets they had at the petting zoo.  It was interesting seeing a camel, since that isn't what you would normally expect at a petting zoo.

{four} 

My students have ePals now from France and Mexico.  They were able to email their pals this week for the first time and were so excited.  They are already learning so many things about other cultures.  Their ePals from France sent their height in their letters and my students were asking me if they were short because they were "only 1 meter" tall.  We had some great discussions about other cultures and it was great seeing them so excited to learn about people.

{five}

Today my cheerleaders were able to participate in the homecoming parade for our local high school.  The parade started at the middle school and made it's way to the high school.  Once at the high school there was a float contest, performance by the band and then cheerleader performances.  All the local cheerleading squads were able to perform for the high school students which was a lot of fun.  It also was a nice day for me to get to have a day off from teaching.  

I couldn't be more thankful that it is Friday.  These past few weeks have been so tiring and I'm ready for a fresh start.  I start new units new units next week which I'm excited about.  I also plan on trying to exercise more next week so I can gain some energy. Next week is also our last football game of the season.  I will be very thankful to have a few weeks off of cheerleading before basketball starts up.  

Professional Development: Mesopotamia

   I absolutely love to learn new things, that is one of the main reasons I became a teacher.  I miss being in college and opening up brand new textbooks (yes, that is the nerd in me). One of my teacher evaluation standards that I chose to work on this year was knowing the content that I teach.   I feel like I can easily come up with fun ideas for teaching but I don't remember ever learning some of the things in our curriculum.  Therefore, one of my goals is to do some intense studying before I start teaching something.  I've decided to reflect on what I have learned by posting some interesting facts on my blog.
   This week I will start teaching Mesopotamia so I have been doing a lot of reading a research about ancient Egypt.  Resources I've used to learn more about this ancient egypt civilization include Discover Kids Magazine, Mr. Donn's Ancient Mesopotamia lesson plan guide, the Bible, Discovery Streaming and Worldmap.com.

Where is Mesopotamia?

Mesopotamia was where we consider to be modern day Iraq.

It is also known as the "Fertile Crescent" because of the two rivers that run through it.  The Tigris and Euphrates rivers provided rich nutrients to the soil which allowed for better farming conditions. 

2 weeks later...

Yes, I am just now posting this post after writing the start of it two weeks ago.  I'm now finished with my Mesopotamia unit and it went very well.  The past few weeks have been quite stressful with my grandma passing away and a lot going on at work.  As this unit comes to an end I am looking forward to a fresh start with Egypt next week! 

Catching Up & ePals

     I have been missing in action the past two weeks.  I never would have thought that coaching cheerleading would be so time consuming.  What makes it the most time consuming is how tired I am by the end of practice or a game and then still have lessons to plan or papers to grade.  So I am going to try very hard to get out of the rut I feel like I am in and locate some more energy.   Other than not feeling like I have any free time, the past two weeks have went really well.  I haven't even began teaching what I find to be the fun stuff yet.

     For  the past couple of weeks in language arts we have been reviewing the parts of speech and writing.  One class wrote superhero stories while the other wrote about barbeque and Pepsi for a writing contest our city holds.  We also have been preparing for having ePals by working on word processing skills.  We currently have one class we are emailing from New Zealand.  We are willing to email exchange any class if you would like to participate with us.  Our school has a safe email system that is filtered for us to email other students with.  My goal with emailing other students is for students to practice writing skills, learn about the daily lives of others and share what they are learning in school.        Please contact me as soon as possible if you would like to be ePals with my classes.  I have a total of 53 students.

     We have done a lot of singing to help reinforce grammar rules.  Last week we sung the preposition song which they really enjoyed.  We even made signs with prepositions on them and acted out the words.  On the quiz I gave, almost all of students got the prepositions questions correct! I wish there was a song and dance for everything I teach.

In social studies we are finishing up learning about early humans.  We studied early humans and how life changed in early Paleolithic and Neolithic time periods.  They will be assessed on the material next week and then we finally get to start learning about civilizations.  I really enjoy teaching Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent.  Flocabulary has a really cute song to go with it.

In other news my students have been very well behaved this year which makes for a very happy teacher.  What I think is helping my students stay behaved is using what I learned from reading Teach Like a Pirate.  I try to never have my students listen to me lecture for too long, and always plan some kind of activity for them to do.  I also use Whole Brain Teaching which keeps them engaged.   One of my classes earned their first reward time this week.  They really enjoyed playing games and what was great was that they were learning while playing games and didn't even realize it! 

    As for what is going on with me outside of school, I just turned 25! Last week was filled with sweet presents and love from my students.   One group came up to be in the hall and burst out in song, while another class sang to me to start our class period.  I've never had a group of students care that much to make sure I had a good birthday.  Even when I entered the gym for cheer practice the squad sang to me.  It was very sweet.  I also had a nice birthday dinner at home.  My family grilled out and I got to see my niece and nephew.  This was one of the best birthdays I had in a long time!